NAVY SHIP CORONADO TO BE COMMISSIONED HERE

CORONADO 
The littoral combat ship Coronado will be commissioned in its namesake city early next year, a citizens group announced this week.

The Coronado, the second of the Navy’s new trimaran littoral vessels, was built by Austal USA in Mobile, Ala., and is now going through builder’s trials.

The ship is expected to arrive in San Diego in January and be commissioned at North Island Naval Air Station in March, according to a statement from the ship’s civilian commissioning committee. The ship’s sponsor is Susan Ring Keith, a lifelong Coronado resident.

In 1966, Keith’s mother, Eleanor Ring, sponsored the last ship to carry the Coronado name, an amphibious transport dock decommissioned in 2006. Keith’s father was Vice Adm. Stanhope C. Ring, a pilot who commanded an aircraft carrier air group during the Battle of Midway in World War II.

Hunter urges Obama to ease VA backlog

U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Alpine, and 25 other military veterans in the House sent a letter this week to President Barack Obama asking him to take steps to ease the claims backlog at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

The bipartisan letter says that 900,000 claims remain unprocessed, leading to more than 70 percent of claim seekers waiting at least four months for an answer on a disability filing. Darrell Issa, R-Vista, was also one of the signers.

The group also points out that since 2009, the VA has received $500 million to address the claims process online. Despite that, according to the letter, the average wait time for a claim decision is 273 days.

On April 11, Hunter and another post-Sept. 11 veteran called for new leadership at the VA, citing the claims backlog. However, their opinion piece in The Washington Post stopped short of an outright call for VA Secretary Eric Shinseki’s resignation.